Cornelia Rau: the verdict

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The Palmer inquiry lays bare an inept and cruel system. David Marr
reports.

PART ONE

SIX MONTHS IN A QUEENSLAND PRISON

Travel was once Cornelia Rau's career. Until her first serious crack-up in 1998, she was a fine Qantas air hostess. Then travel became part of her pathology: a schizophrenic woman of immense energy, on the run from her family, from mental hospitals and from Australia. She caught planes, she hitched, she took terrible risks on wild jaunts through Thailand, South America and Europe. She turned up dishevelled on the doorstep of family friends abroad; she was rescued by Australian officials in far-flung cities; more than once her parents hauled her home.

On March 17 last year, she slipped away from the psychiatric wing of Manly Hospital and stripped her account of $2000. She was off again. But within days something happened that would shape this story from beginning to end: she lost her new passport issued at the German consulate in Woollahra a few weeks earlier. To replace it would risk alerting her family and see her forced back to hospital. Somewhere on the road to far north Queensland she stole another. It was Norwegian and useless to her. By late March, Rau was trapped.

What happened next has a definite if warped logic to it: a woman turned up at Cape York in the middle of the rainy season calling herself Anna Brotmeyer or Anna Schmidt. She said she was a German backpacker who had overstayed her time in Australia. Driven eight hours down the rutted road to Cairns, she announced first to the police and then to the honorary German consul that she wanted a new passport and wanted to go home.

The 10-month saga of this woman's mistreatment at the hands of the Immigration Department is so rich in appalling detail it is easy to lose sight of the simple strategy that lay behind it all: to leave Anna behind bars, her health failing, until she revealed the details needed to issue those fresh papers. This approach was not invented for Anna. We're talking standard practice here: the recalcitrant remain locked up until they co-operate, forever if necessary.

Everything depended on the Germans. This is not just the story of how the Immigration Department failed a very ill Australian resident, Cornelia Rau. It's also the story of a clash of bureaucratic cultures: between the scrupulous Germans and their insistence on hard evidence, and the sloppy Australians who never found a shred of evidence to support the only plan they ever thought up to solve this mess: to deport to Germany the woman known as Anna. Cornelia was German, of course. Anna was not. Anna was a mad woman's delusion. Australian officials believed in her to the end.

And if the result was cruel, what does that matter? Isn't having an Immigration Department that's known to be nasty, dilatory and inflexible as much part of the deterrence system as putting the navy into the Indian Ocean and building detention prisons in the desert? Isn't this how Australia sends a message to refugees and would-be illegal immigrants across the world: don't try it on?

ANNA was flown down from Cairns by Queensland Police Air Wing on April 5 last year and taken to the Brisbane Women's prison. In his report published last week, the former commissioner of the Australian Federal Police, Mick Palmer, wrote: "She was not a prisoner, had done nothing wrong, and was put there simply for administrative convenience." Prisoners report that was Anna's mantra through the months ahead: "I have done nothing wrong."

The Immigration Department did not move swiftly. It was a couple of days before Ben Stoneley, the compliance officer responsible for liaising with detainees in prison, went out to Wacol to visit Anna. She gave him the same messy, incomplete biography she had given the police and Iris Indorato, the honorary German consul in Cairns: she was German, had grown up on a farm near Dresden but the hippie lifestyle she led as a child left her unsure of her parents' names or her own date of birth. She thought she might be 25. She claimed her lost passport was in the name Schmidt.

Immigration already knew Anna's story was fundamentally flawed. Stoneley had confirmed that none of the various permutations of names Anna had given - Schmidt, Schmitz, Brotmeyer - turned up on the department's database of movements in and out of Australia. Palmer wrote: "Australia has one of the most effective Movements databases in the world." If a name doesn't appear there, then the name is false or that person has never travelled in and out of the country.

Palmer says this should have alerted Immigration Department staff "at an early stage that there was something strange about this situation and that more thorough assessment was called for". Instead, Anna was left to come to her senses.

Stoneley waited three weeks before visiting her again. After that inconclusive meeting, he did not visit her at Wacol for another five months. This was, Palmer noted, a breach of Departmental Instruction 244 that requires case officers "to undertake monthly personal visits with detainees".

Debbie Kilroy from the prison reform group, Sisters Inside, met Anna and began to lobby Stoneley on her behalf. Anna had come to Kilroy in great distress. "I'm not supposed to be here. I don't know what's going on. I haven't done anything wrong." According to Kilroy, Stoneley explained that Anna would be held "until she gives better information on her identity". He told Kilroy they needed "honest" information.

After a month, Immigration sent Anna an application form for German papers. The Germans had already dismissed the shabby biography Anna presented up in Cairns. Now Anna made a pathetic attempt to comply with the republic's bureaucratic demands. She could not even fill in her own date of birth. The German consulate in Sydney advised Immigration not to bother lodging the application as it was so obviously incomplete.

That was in mid-May. From time to time, the immigration office in Brisbane talked about this case but essentially Anna was just left out at Wacol, parked in a women's prison. Palmer is scathing about the failure to get her out of there, to review her case, to think afresh. But the department plodded down the only course it ever chose to pursue: prove the woman German and deport her.

In mid-June, the Australian embassy in Berlin was asked to lend a hand. Diplomatic efforts to identify Anna would drag on into August. In these months of absolute inaction, Anna's behaviour deteriorated dramatically.

Prisons everywhere face the problem of distinguishing bad behaviour from mental collapse. Anna's behaviour had been odd from the beginning. The first doctor to examine her at Wacol put this down to her being "a stranger in a strange land". By May, Anna had been two months without medication for schizophrenia and was showing distressing signs of what prison records called "unusual behaviour and poor hygiene". She paced; she stared; she hoarded food; her moods swung about; she wouldn't wash.

Was she to be treated or disciplined? A psychologist from the Prison Mental Health Service saw no evidence of mental illness and when Anna's behaviour deteriorated further in June, she began to be disciplined by being placed for days at a time in "separate confinement". She was extremely distressed.

Finally on August 10 a psychiatrist, Dr Dominique Hannah, was called in and after only a few moments with Anna realised something was badly amiss. She reported: "The behaviour of Ms Brotmeyer had been becoming increasingly bizarre and her presentation was consistent with a psychotic disorder." She recommended Anna be taken to hospital for assessment.

Ten days later Anna found herself - once again - at Brisbane's Princess Alexandra Hospital. As Cornelia Rau she had been treated there for about a month in 2002. No one recognised her now. But the grim irony was that somewhere in the hospital were already the records needed to identify this woman's profound mental problems.

Anna brought few records from prison to assist the clinicians, but she did bring two prison guards who had to remain in line of sight at all times - despite clinical staff being advised: "Ms Brotmeyer was not at risk to herself or others." Palmer believed the presence of those guards "hampered" Anna's assessment. The department's top priority, it seems, was not her health but making sure she didn't do a runner.

Prison medical staff were aghast when Anna returned on August 26 with her papers stamped: "Does not fulfil any diagnostic criteria for mental illness." Anna was soon back in confinement, again for failing to wash. Dr Hannah, due to visit her at this time, was turned away by the prison "for operational reasons". Palmer was very critical of this: "Only in the most extreme circumstances should essential medical treatment be deferred."

Immigration's hopes of deporting Anna at any moment were now beginning to fade. From the moment of her arrival in prison in April - with her papers marked "For deportation tomorrow" - everyone seemed to assume she was going at any day. Even in August, the staff at Princess Alexandra were under the impression she would be "repatriated to Germany on discharge from the unit".

Palmer birched the Immigration Department for not correcting this misapprehension which he believed contributed to the failure of proper care for Anna.

The truth was that after holding this woman in prison for nearly six months, Immigration frankly didn't have a clue who she was or a hope in hell of deporting her. Shortly after emerging from hospital, Anna rang the German consulate in Brisbane and on September 17, Ursula Sterf and Detlef Sulzer visited her at Wacol. Nothing came of it. In Palmer's words: "She repeats her story but provides insufficient details to allow for the issuing of a German passport."

What now? Palmer is amazed that the officers dealing with Anna's case hadn't by this time begun to consider the possibility that she may be Australian. Anna sounded Australian and knew an awful lot about the country for a backpacker. But all the way to end, the Department of Immigration never focused on the possibility that the woman they had on their hands was anything but a German backpacker who had outstayed her visa.

Palmer accuses the department of rigid thinking and "an entrenched culture fixed on process and apparently oblivious to the outcomes being achieved". He points to poor sleuthing, poor records, poor case management and overwork. He was particularly scathing that the department was oblivious to the plight of an innocent woman housed for so long in a prison.

Palmer wrote: "The fact that a person's liberty had been taken seemed to be accepted simply as a 'matter of fact' and a result of the person's own doing and circumstances brought about by their actions." Under the department's own rules, prison is only ever to be "a last resort" for immigration detainees, and only used until alternative arrangements can be made. Anna had been in the Brisbane Women's prison for six months. "Had proper processes been adhered to," Palmer wrote, "she might not have been there for more than a week."

This is a country where public servants can, on their own authority, send people to prison for long periods. No magistrates, no judges. As Palmer pointed out, these are "exceptional, even extraordinary powers" and he found it a matter of great concern that immigration officers were expected to exercise them "without adequate training, without proper management and oversight, with poor information systems, and with no genuine checks and balances".

Palmer does not address a deeper scandal: that the department has been at loggerheads with the courts for years over a fundamental question. What test must officers apply when holding people in detention for any length of time?

Is it enough to "reasonably suspect" the person is unlawfully in Australia, or must officers be much, much more certain?

Immigration believes reasonable suspicion is enough. Giving evidence to a Senate estimates committee earlier this year, the Immigration Minister, Amanda Vanstone and her then department head, Bill Farmer, argued for maximum leeway in the hands of their officers. Vanstone told the senators that immigration detention is "lawful up until the time you discovered that your suspicion was incorrect".

But that is not what the courts say. In 2003, a full federal court of three judges headed by the Chief Justice of the court, Michael Black, unanimously declared that suspicion is not enough. The department must know someone is unlawfully in Australia to hold them for any length of time. But the Immigration Department continues to work on a day-to-day basis in defiance of that ruling.

In Anna's case, officers may have had reasonable grounds to suspect she was unlawfully in Australia in the very early days of the saga - though even that is open to question - but they certainly never established she actually was unlawfully in this country. It was only ever suspicion.

Palmer does not get involved in this stand-off between the department and the courts, but he hints very strongly that as the weeks went by, and absolutely nothing was discovered to sustain the department's suspicions, that Anna should have been released.

One of Palmer's principal findings is this: "Officers should not only have continued inquiries aimed at identifying Anna; they should also have continued to question whether they were still able to demonstrate that the suspicion on which the detention was originally based persisted and that it was still reasonably held."

They did not. Instead, it was decided to transfer Anna to Baxter detention centre in South Australia - not an imminent deportee now, but a long stayer.

Anna was once again in the punishment cells when her case officer, Stoneley, arrived on September 30. It was their first face-to-face meeting since May. Documents provided to the Palmer inquiry by the Queensland Government record that Anna was "teary and feeling sad because she had been in the detention unit for so long". She refused to sign the notice of intended transfer Stoneley handed her.

A few days later, Anna was restrained by prison officers and 10 milligrams of the sedative diazepam was administered to her intramuscularly. Next day, another 10 milligrams was administered orally and she was placed in restraints. Taken to Brisbane Airport, she was flown on commercial flights first to Adelaide and then Whyalla where a van was waiting to take her out to the camp.